Typed, a crowdfunded blog platform, closes down today

It’s not often in blogging you get to see a story come to a definitive end, but today I do.

Waaaay back in 2015 – almost exactly three years ago – I backed a crowdfunder for a new blogging platform from Realmac Software in Brighton.

Today that platform dies.

It seems to have struggled from early on. It was available in beta by that May, and I quite liked what I saw. But development seemed to stall, and their own blog suddenly stopped publishing in February 2016. The opening sentence of the post was not encouraging:

February was a terrible month.

Only one further post was published on that blog – in December 2016. Ironically, the last words published on the blog were:

We’re in this for the long haul.
Happy Typing.

That was it for the blog. And then the support forum abruptly disappeared with no word. Alarm bells started to ring.

In April of 2017, a death was announced, because it was obvious that Realmac weren’t getting enough revenue from the platform, and saw no way towards having it:

For the last 8+ months, Typed.com has been running at a loss. I’ve tried hard to make Typed.com viable, it’s a great platform and I still believe in it. However, at the end of the day, it comes down to cost.

I didn’t notice for a few months. But then, the post was buried in a forum for an entirely different piece of software. Realmac did not handle this well. Rewards backers paid for like stickers and t-shirts were never delivered. Communication to those backers — many of whom paid for life memberships — dried up. As the platform struggled, the team seemed to lose interest in it and – rather unforgivably – in those people who had paid to get it going.

I won’t beat about the bush: I’m disappointed by Realmac. They’re a local company to me, whose software I’ve tried to support. I even appeared in an advert for them:

My disappointment isn’t in the failure of the platform: that was always a risk. It’s on how very badly they mishandled the communications to the users and backers.

Finally, the end of this sorry tale has come. Any time now, the servers go down, and that’s the end of Typed.

The crowdfunder’s regret?

Do I regret backing it? No. The blogging world still needs innovation. I’ve backed two crowdfunded blog platforms, and one microblogging platform. Typed might be dying, but Ghost is still going strong. It hit 1.0 last summer, and has continued to develop since.

Innovation involves risk. One paid off. One didn’t. That’s OK – things move on. micro.blog, the microblogging service I backed, is a whole bunch of fun, and I’m having some great conversations there, and doing some fun blogging.

RIP Typed. You were a nice idea that never really got traction.